Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
The revolution will not be televised; it will come via meme. We will know soon enough whether Donald Trump decides to oust Venezuela’s regime. Trump’s seemingly random obsession with the country is a distillation of his foreign policy. He is targeting it for domestic US reasons, building his case via social media and is contemptuous of law and ethics. Since Venezuela is in America’s backyard, regime change would carry few risks of global escalation.
The question is whether he can pull off regime change without putting US boots on the ground. The roughly 15,000 US military personnel Trump has put within striking distance of Venezuela is a measure of his ambivalence. By a factor of at least 10, the US presence is too great for even an intensified anti-drug operation. That is why even fishing boats are not safe. Yet the US build-up is too small for a land invasion. This puts Trump in a no man’s land between overkill and underprepared.
His hope thus seems to be to remove Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, via intimidation. That Trump’s manoeuvres are performative makes them no less real. Last weekend, he announced a no-fly zone. Yet he did this on social media rather than through the Pentagon. Though it would be a brave aircraft that strays into Venezuelan airspace, Trump’s edict carries no operational force. “Don’t read anything into it,” he said the next day. Naturally pilots are reading into it. Venezuelan airspace has gone quiet.
In outward form, a Trump regime change would not depart from US tradition. Though counts are contentious, America has probably ousted more foreign regimes than any other power in history. The largest share have been in the western hemisphere, chiefly in Central America. Washington has traditionally done this by arranging coups. Full-scale land invasion is rare. The 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba showed the pitfalls of counting on local support. The 1989-90 invasion of Panama to oust the drug kingpin Manuel Noriega was swiftly executed. However, Panama is tiny and US troops were already stationed there. With 30mn people and a jungle hinterland, Venezuela would be a far tougher prospect.
Yet Trump is blocking off his exits. Should he somehow convince Maduro to leave — a large bribe, comfortable exile and legal immunity for him and his henchmen might just work — Venezuela could yet become a Trump success. That is unlikely but cannot be ruled out. Should Venezuela’s strongman stick to his guns, however, Trump will find it very hard to back down. His instinct to order a US military operation on the cheap is on ample display.
The risks of an epic blunder are thus growing. Trump’s rebranded “secretary of war”, Pete Hegseth, is busy removing the Pentagon’s prudential guardrails. Most of the focus has been on Hegseth’s alleged order to “kill everybody” in the first of his series of strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug-smuggling vessels. But almost no US soldiers, let alone a civilian leader, have ever been prosecuted for war crimes. Even the officer who led the 1968 gunning down of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai got away with just three years of house arrest.
Hegseth’s campaign to vaporise small boats without providing clear evidence that their occupants are “narco-terrorists” — let alone legitimate combatants — is by most counts illegal. But he will almost certainly get away with it. More serious is his corrosive effect on US military professionalism. Hegseth has built his career, and came to Trump’s notice, by complaining about woke restraints on rules of combat. He even lectured America’s top 800 military leaders on how to be more masculine.
Having replaced two of the US service chiefs and the chair and vice-chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Trump and Hegseth have arranged loyalty at the top of the Pentagon. Those who express doubts are largely sidelined or retire. Legal advisers have been purged. The contempt shown for the US military’s hard-won diversity has further shaken morale. An esprit de corps that has taken decades to build is being destroyed in short order. Hegseth’s firing would not undo that.
The damage to US military effectiveness is real. There is also an immediate danger. America is being led by a president and civilian appointee who command little respect among the senior brass. The message to US generals is that the law is for wimps. Dwight Eisenhower, the general who became president, said that “plans are worthless but planning is everything”. If Trump goes for regime change in Venezuela, it will be on the basis of Hegseth’s planning. His memes would doubtless be punchy.